Machine setup equipment is expensive - so why isn’t it being used?

The problem

There’s lots of innovative equipment on the market that promises to get your machine tools operating at peak performance. By investing in this type of kit, you know you’ll be able to get on top of your machine issues, introduce a regular maintenance checking schedule and produce better quality parts. But very quickly you find you’re just not using the equipment anymore.

What on earth, and why not?!

In our experience there are a number of reasons why machine set-up equipment is left on a shelf:

1. It involves too much machine downtime. Some equipment requires the machine to be taken down for a couple of hours to use it - and after the machine has been down for two hours, the machine is declared okay. Production teams don’t like losing production hours just to be told the machine was okay in the first place, so they stop performing regular checks and start sending maintenance engineers away. And then things go wrong.
   
   
2. No one knows where the equipment is. When equipment is not being used regularly it quickly gets forgotten about and ends up at the back of a cupboard. Someone from another department may come and borrow it, and it’s never missed. But when you come to really need to use it, no one can remember ever seeing it, so there’s absolutley no chance of finding it.
   
   
3. No one knows how to use it. Technical equipment requires training, and if people stop using the equipment their knowledge of how to use it degrades very rapidly. And even if your operators do remember how to use the equipment, what happens when they move to another department, or leave the business entirely?
   
   
4. No one knows how to interpret the results from using the equipment. Many of the results generated by machine set-up equipment need a high level of expertise to interpret them correctly. Does your team have the right skills to interpret the results and identify the specific changes that need to be made to the mechanical setup of the machine tool, or the controller parameters?
   
   
5. It’s a manual task and you’re an automated shop. Once automation has been introduced into your machine shop, and the line is fed with stock, the logistics of regularly taking machines out of production for checks can be an issue. Often a decision is taken to leave the line running rather than introducing manual checks - until of course bad parts start coming off the line. Then the checks are carried out urgently, but you’ve already produced bad parts.
   
   
6. It’s ‘easier’ to wait for a part to fail QA and investigate why later. It may been seen as an easy option, and a way of avoiding machine downtime, to say a machine is capable of machining parts without checking it first. But by the time the part is being inspected in QA, there are so many thousands of possible error combinations it is impossible to say if it is the machine that caused the error on a part, or if it was caused by another factor in your process. As a result, you'll spend hours hunting for machine errors that may never be found because they could be in the fixturing, the probing system, the probe setup and calibration or even the physical transfer of the part to the QA department.

The solution

So, what can you do about this?

• Invest in automated machine-checking software. MSP’s NC-Checker can automatically tell you when your machine's not performing correctly, without you needing to take the machine down to find out. NC-Checker’s benchmark reports highlight the potential problems on the machine, then you can use your machine set-up equipment to discover what the problem really is. You only need to call out maintenance teams when you know there is a specific problem, and then you can use NC-Checker to make sure the problem has actually been fixed. No more downtime for perfectly good machines - just a clear message that you need to perform machine checks as soon as the benchmark turns red.
• Only use external help when you need to. You need skilled expertise to use the machine set-up equipment, but with NC-Checker you will know exactly when it is needed. Trained experts can be brought in from external sources on an as-needs basis, rather than having to maintain a constant skill level within your business.
• Don't just wait for parts to fail. If you are waiting for parts to fail before you investigate the cause, you will be compounding your problems exponentially. Once you’ve produced a bad part, there are far too many unknowns to categorically state that it’s the machine tool that caused the problem with the part - rather than the fixturing, or the probing system, or the probe setup, or the probe calibration, or the part alignment.

Next steps

If you think you should be getting more from your existing equipment, or just need a reminder of why you bought it in the first place, get in touch with us at MSP and we’ll show you how.